


Dead End Love

by aghamora



Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Angst, Blood and Injury, F/M, Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-03
Updated: 2016-10-03
Packaged: 2018-08-19 09:50:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8200705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: In which Frank and Laurel meet again after a summer apart, and it’s far from a joyous reunion.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So I really wanted to write my version of a Flaurel reunion, focusing less on the facts of what happened/didn’t happen and instead being more emotion-based, as opposed to just being an interrogation?? I guess if that makes sense. And this isn’t really happy so…. if you want fluff/less depression maybe steer clear lmao.
> 
> But other than that enjoy!!

She doesn’t know how she got here. She figures it doesn’t really matter, in the grand scheme of things.

All she knows is that she’s here now.

 _Here_. A seedy Motel 6 two hours outside the city off a remote exit on the highway; two stories high, with a little parking lot beneath, sparsely populated with cars. There’s a flickering neon sign shining down from above, tinting the darkness bluish-green. It makes everything oddly eerie; ominous, like something out of a horror movie. Or a nightmare. Some odd alternate dimension where reality stops just short of feeling real.

She doesn’t know why she’s here. She feels crazy, and after everything it wouldn’t surprise her if she was, in fact, legally off her rocker. She must be, to be doing this.

_“She tried to kill me, Laurel. She tell you that?”_

She doesn’t know why she’s here. Except she does.

Him. _Frank._

Room 203. He’d given her the number over the phone; it’d taken some prying, but he’d been drunk and distraught enough to do it, along with some garbled half-directions. Her movements feel robotic as she makes her way up to the second level, her legs too heavy, stairs imposingly tall and continually elongating with every step she ascends. The world feels barely real around her. _Him. Frank_. She shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be going to him. She should be anywhere else in the world besides this place.

Annalise and Bonnie will kill her – probably literally, if what Annalise supposedly tried to do to Frank is any indication. Somehow she doesn’t care, walks with an almost fatalistic air about her, daring them to. If she dies she dies.

She has to see him first.

_“She tried to kill me, Laurel. She tell you that?”_

She reaches the door, knocks three times with her heart in her throat and somehow simultaneously in the pit of her stomach, everything rearranged and twisted up into knots inside her. She doesn’t know what she’s expecting to find, what she _wants_ to find. She should run. Stay away. She was stupid to come here and risk everything, after all that he’s done, hurt and destroyed so many people, including her, _God_ , she must be the biggest fucking idiot in the world-

“’S open. Come in.”

His voice. She freezes. Considers, again, the fact that she ought to run, but her legs feel heavy as cement, rooted to the floor beneath her. It’s too late to back out now – so she turns the doorknob and pushes it open, the heaviest weight in the world.

She doesn’t see him, at first. The room is near pitch-black, all the shapes before her eyes grey and fuzzy, indiscernible. There’re bottles of liquor littering the carpet, leading a trail to the bed. It reeks of alcohol, too; alcohol and mold, and if grief and death had a smell Laurel imagines it’d smell like that too. She’d known it would be bad, had been able to deduce as much from his brief, drunken phone call. But she hadn’t known it would be like _this._

She doesn’t see him, at first. Then, the moonlight from the doorway falls on him, and she does.

She barely recognizes him.

He’s shaved; hair buzzed and beard gone. He’s been beaten, too – beaten bad, probably within an inch of his life, with deep, hideous gashes all over his face. One of his eyes is blackened, swollen shut. His lip is split, puffy. Every inch of his skin seems to be gruesome shades of black and blue, and there’s blood on his shirt under his jacket; probably his, or maybe not. She doesn’t want to think about who else it might belong to.

And the sight of him like this, beaten and bloody, after so long – _years_ , might as well have been years, or an entire lifetime – makes her melt, just as much as it makes her want to stumble forward and be sick on the floor.

“Frank?”

It’s the only word she can summon up, the only one she knows in that instant; his name. Her voice is hardly more than a whisper, but it’s enough to get him to turn his head towards her as if startled by the sound. And she keeps her eyes locked on him, can’t look away. Can’t breathe, or move; her whole body seems to shut down and leave her stranded, gaping dumbly. Horrified. He’s here. He’s alive.

But he, this… This isn’t _Frank._

He doesn’t answer. He’s sitting on the bed, bottle of some alcohol or other in his hand, and he gives her a look when she says his name, almost cursory; bleary-eyed, like he recognizes it’s her but doesn’t, at the same time. There’s a flicker in his eyes, for a second. Of something – recognition, maybe. But then it dies, withers to nothing, and he turns his head away from her, fixing his eyes straight ahead, empty. He doesn’t say a word, when she enters. Nothing.

And she hadn’t known what she’d been expecting, but fuck, she hadn’t been expecting _this_.

She takes a step inside. Then two, three, until she’s standing closer to him, still cautious, keeping her distance. She thinks she might be shaking, isn’t sure – but not from fear. From emotion; overwhelming emotion, so many hitting her at once in so many different ways that it sends her head reeling, struggling to latch onto one before it slips away. It’s him. He’s here. He’s alive.

And he won’t look at her. He won’t even speak to her.

“Frank?” she manages to choke out, again. She swallows thickly, clutching her purse a bit tighter to her side. “God, Frank, what…”

She can’t finish that sentence. Tears spring to her eyes and they burn, _God_ they scald like acid. She knows she’s shaking now, her bones vibrating with horror – at the ghastly sight of him: bloodied and swollen and hideous and nothing like the man she’d known once, in another life. This is not Frank. Not the Frank she’d known.

It _is._

“Annalise,” is all the answer she gets to her half-formed question, and he follows it up with a deep swig from the bottle. “That’s what.”

Her stomach sours. “You said… you said she tried to kill you. She… sent someone?”

She doesn’t get a verbal response; just a nod. He won’t look at her, almost seems to shrink away from her, ashamed. Ashamed to let her see him – and she never _has_ seen him like this, never anything remotely close to this. This is not Frank.

This is a dead man walking. Zombie. Not her Frank.

“What happened to them?” she manages to choke out, swallowing the bile in her throat, praying not to get the answer she’s expecting.

Again, his answer is simple, almost childlike, though the words that follow are not a child’s words. “I killed him.” A pause. Laurel sinks down onto the bed next to him, numb. Still, he won’t so much as spare her a glance. “Broke his neck.”

She closes her eyes, the blow hitting her square in the chest, and just because she’d been anticipating it doesn’t make it any less horrific; it knows all the wind out of her, fucking suffocates her. Nausea roils in her gut, twisting and turning somewhere deep inside her. She’s still shaking – only faintly, but still shaking, and she can’t breathe, _God,_ why can’t she _breathe_ -

This is not Frank. She doesn’t recognize the man before her. This dead-eyed creature; barely a person, feral as a dog. No humanity left in him. This is not _Frank_.

It _is._

A moment of silence – the heaviest in the world, agony to her. Then-

“You shouldn’t be here,” he mutters, his voice croaking and rattling in his throat like he hasn’t used it in days, still refusing to meet her eyes, still distant, and suddenly she can’t stand that, needs so desperately to get him to look at her, _see_ her, bring out something of the man he’d been, once. Some scrap of his old self. It must be in there, somewhere; his old mannerisms, old sense of humor. That old mischief in his eyes. Something.

Anything, fuck, at this point she’d settle for _anything._ A blink. _Blink once for yes, if you’re still you. Twice for no. Please._

“Look at me,” she says softly, leaning forward, leaning in closer. Her arm brushes his, and she swears to God he flinches ever so slightly, but doesn’t move away. He just stays silent, not in an obstinate way but in that quiet, hollow, empty way of his that he’s adopted as of late. That sinister serenity. Deadly. Lethal.

No answer. She gulps, struggling to swallow her tears, steady herself.

“Why won’t you look at me?”

Nothing, still. She sighs, and it shudders on the way out, and suddenly she wants to scream at him, grab him and shake him and maybe, just maybe, rattle something loose in his head, get him to _respond_. Talk to her.

“Frank, just…” Her voice catches. “Just look at me, please.”

He does, finally. It’s a slow movement, like someone turning their head toward the sun, wincing – but he does. And it’s hard to see his face through the darkness, but quickly she realizes how savagely he’d been beaten, nose crooked and probably broken. Eyes squinty, opened just a crack, but it’s enough for her to see something behind them; something flashing, as he looks at her, mouth hanging slightly agape like he can’t quite believe she’s real.

A moment, passes. She runs her eyes over his face, absorbing every detail, every contusion and discoloration and violence that’d been done to him, before finally she snaps out of it and somehow manages to haul herself to feet. She goes for the bathroom, swiping a washcloth off the counter, and striding back out into the bedroom with renewed purpose. He doesn’t ask what she’s doing, not even when she pries the bottle of liquor out of his hands and soaks the fabric with it.

“You need to clean those,” she says, her mind shifting over to a state of pragmatism to avoid the meltdown she can feel inevitably careening towards her. She raises the washcloth to his face, daring to inch a bit closer to him. “Here. Let me.”

Again he turns to look at her, recoiling, at first, like he doesn’t want her to touch him. Like he doesn’t trust her, doesn’t trust anyone. _Spooked animal_ , she thinks. He looks like a spooked animal, almost nonverbal. Like a dog that’s been beaten too long and too often to recognize the blows, recognize anything, wary even of tenderness. He seems almost to fold himself into the darkness, too. Become one with it.

He was always dark. She’d just never recognized _how_ dark.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he echoes again, this time with a note of warning in his voice, as if those are the only words he knows.

Laurel raises her chin, defiant. “Why?”

A pause. He clenches his jaw, something in him wavering, before finally he admits, “I didn’t want you to see me like this, Laurel.”

 _Yeah, well_ , she thinks, wanting to laugh, irrationally; cackle like a madwoman, _I sure fucking did not either._

“Well, I already did,” she manages to sound dismissive, nonchalant, even though she thinks she could weep at the sound of him saying her name. She clears her throat, fixing him with a firm look. “So, are you going to let me do this or not?”

Frank hesitates, at first.

Then, he sighs, and all the air goes out of him, and his shoulders slump. And again, all she gets is a nod – but a nod is good enough for her. A nod is all she needs.

He hisses when she presses the cloth down onto a bloody gash on his forehead, and she backs off for a moment to let him adjust to the pain before resuming her ministrations, slow and steady. It feels so frighteningly impersonal, somehow, touching him like this. There’s distance between them; miles, even though they’re barely a foot apart, and this thing between them, whatever it’d been once, is broken. She’d expected that, before coming here tonight. But she knows it now, as sure as she’s breathing, and it hurts so impossibly much. 

For a while she works without a word. Shockingly, Frank is the one to speak up.

“They know you’re here?”

He doesn’t have to elaborate; Laurel knows who he means. She shakes her head, eyes fixed on a cut on his cheekbone as she dabs at it. “No.”

More silence. She doesn’t know how to fill it; she has so many questions that she’s full to bursting, but she refrains. Interrogating Frank in this semi-catatonic state – or whatever state he’s in – won’t be productive, and she recognizes this. Slow and steady. One by one.

The important things, first.

“What’d you do with the body?” she asks, business-like, all too cavalier about murder. It’s all in a day’s work for her now, burying bodies.

“Staged a car accident,” he grunts. “Then set it on fire. Won’t be any DNA.”

Okay. She lets out a breath. Okay, check that off the list: body, gone. The body is not sitting in the bathtub in the next room. Or in his trunk, decaying.

Okay. She can handle this.

“They’re not looking for you?” she continues, rewetting the cloth. “The cops?”

A head shake – subtle, but visible nonetheless. She relaxes further. Number two: no cops. She doesn’t have to worry about imminently relocating both him and herself.

She can handle this. They’re okay.

Frank shifts, then, and winces when he does, one of his hands reflexively going to his side. She presses her lips into a grim line when she sees it.

“What’s wrong?”

“Ribs,” he says. “Broke ‘em in the car accident.”

She exhales sharply, refocusing her efforts on his wounds. “You need to get to a hospital, before one of them punctures your lung.”

Finally, he looks at her, and it isn’t quite as empty a look as it has been; there’s something there, something like dark, dull amusement. “You know I can’t.”

Yes, she does. She knows, and she was expecting that; hospitals ask questions he can’t answer. And suddenly she realizes she has no idea how to help him, how to even remotely begin to fix this – any of this. She can’t. She can’t do a single goddamn _thing_ and she feels so powerless she wants to scream, rip her hair out by the roots. But she doesn’t.

If she doesn’t stay calm now, calm enough for the both of them, she has no fucking clue what they’ll do.

She works diligently, and just as she’s finishing up he shrugs off his jacket, tossing it aside. And that’s what she notices the wound on his forearm: skin slashed deep, maybe from the accident too, down far enough to need stitches and still bloody, oozing black in the moonlight. Her stomach turns, for what she swears must be the millionth time tonight, but she keeps her jaw set, features stoic. _Later._ She can break later. He needs her, now.

He’s lost all ability to take care of himself and he fucking needs her. And it makes her so stupidly, irrationally happy that he needs her.

And it also makes her feel sick, sick deep inside. Sick in her soul.

“That needs stitches,” she observes, matter-of-factly. “Or it’ll get infected.”

He shrugs it off, still not budging from his spot on the bed. “It’s fine.”

“No, it’s not,” she snaps, a bit harsher than she intends to sound, and gets to her feet. “You have a sewing kit?”

“In the suitcase.”

She rummages for a while, before locating it and unzipping the little black pouch. She remembers seeing this before, teasing him about being a 60’s housewife when he’d used to use it to sew broken buttons back on his clothes. She wonders if he’d brought it along for that reason – or brought it because he’d anticipated needing to suture his own wounds from time to time.

Whatever the reason, she has it, and she’s glad she has it. She knows what to do. She can handle this. She can.

She’s trying, at least.

“You know how to use that?” he murmurs, disbelieving. In another day and age maybe his voice would’ve been teasing, mocking the rich girl for knowing how to preform down and dirty do-it-yourself surgery, but it isn’t, in this one.

She threads the smallest needle, not sparing him a glance. “I’ve seen it done.”

She doesn’t elaborate. He doesn’t ask her to.

“I can do it, Laurel,” he insists, instead. She glowers at him.

“I got it. Sit still.”

He does. He doesn’t disobey her, and she knows he won’t. And so she takes a breath to steel herself, fighting back the wave of nausea that passes through her, and goes to work.

Her nanny had taught her how to sew in middle school, to have “practical” skills – though certainly she hadn’t been envisioning this kind of practicality. Shaking away the thought, she pours a splash of the liquor onto the cut, hoping to sterilize it as best she can, and Frank just barely bites back his growl of pain, the muscles in his jaw ripping visibly as he clenches it – and Laurel has to resist the urge not to follow it up by taking a drink of her own to prepare herself. But she doesn’t. Instead she sucks in a breath and pierces his skin with the needle, fingers nimble and dexterous, and draws the thread over to the other side. And she’s never been squeamish, and this is far from the worst thing she’s seen in her life, but it makes her stomach turn inside her nonetheless, bile rising hot in her throat.

She goes slow. Slow and steady. And it’s messy, all torn, jagged bits of flesh and uneven stitches, not at all neat and maybe not even very effective, and her hands are trembling so bad she’s probably hurting him more than she should be. But he isn’t saying anything, beyond wincing every so often, hiding the pain even though she knows it must be worse than he’s letting on.

She can feel his eyes on her as she works. She doesn’t look up.

She excuses herself, after she’s done and her hands are coated with his blood, and somehow manages to stumble her way into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. It’s only then that she leans over the toilet, hands on her knees, and lets herself retch into it, bloody hands clambering to hold back her hair. She might be crying. Probably is. She vomits, in between silent, gut-wrenching sobs, her stomach lurching painfully, and spits out the taste after it settles, falling back against the filthy tile wall and grappling for the toilet handle to flush it.

Hands. Hands next. She’s okay. She can do this.

She washes them longer than she needs to, trying to rinse the crimson stains out from underneath her fingernails beneath the sterile fluorescent lights above her, but not having much luck. She’s had blood on her hands before; this is nothing new. She can deal with this.

Only she can’t.

She can’t deal with _any_ of this.

With Frank; this all but catatonic, mutilated, unpredictable version of Frank who she doesn’t know and doesn’t know how to communicate with, who she can’t even begin to understand; who maybe had been buried somewhere deep inside Frank all along, just waiting to be liberated. With what he’s done – Lila and Annalise’s henchman and Mahoney and maybe there’s been more he’s not telling her about these past few months, God, maybe there’s more. _I killed him. Broke his neck._ He broke a man’s neck. Snapped it like a twig. He did that. Frank, who had used to touch her with all the tenderness in the world, had done that with his bare hands. And strangled an innocent girl. He did that too.

 _I killed him. Broke his neck_ – and God, God, she’s going to be sick again.

Somehow she manages to make herself reemerge. She doesn’t hide herself away to cry; he’ll know if she cries, will sense it and come looking for her. She can cry later. She knows she looks like hell, and she’ll deal with that later too. So she steps out, hands clean, eyes red-rimmed but otherwise composed enough. She has nothing else in her stomach to vomit up, at least, and the nausea now is empty, hollow. It feels permanent, too, like she’ll never be able to make herself stop feeling sick after this night, even if she tries.

Frank has gotten to his feet and crossed the room, standing by the window near the door. The blinds are closed, only a few rogue rays of moonlight straying in, and he’s running his fingers idly over his new stitches, the gashes on his face illuminated ever so slightly; a grisly sort of silhouette. He reminds her of decay. Of death.

From this angle, again, she can barely recognize him. She supposes she’s got to get used to that from now on: not recognizing him. Not knowing this man.

“Frank?”

Her voice comes out as a squeak. He jumps, a little, but doesn’t look her way, like he’s taken to doing lately. He still won’t look at her, weighed down by all that shame and self-loathing.

“You should go,” is all he says, finally.

She blinks. “What?”

“You should go,” he repeats, coldly. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“After everything?” she breathes, advancing towards him, eyes blurring with tears before she can help it. “I-it’s been months, a whole summer, and _finally_ you tell me where you are… and now you want me to go?”

He gulps, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. “Laurel-”

“They tried… to turn me against you.” She stops to suck in a breath. “Bonnie and Annalise, they-”

“You shoulda listened to them,” he bites out, and finally turns to her, and suddenly it’s like he’s looming over her, a predatory gleam in his eyes; tall and terrifying. But she doesn’t cower. She won’t cower. “They were right.”

She shakes her head. “Frank, what’re you tal-”

“I’m dangerous,” is all he says. He goes silent for a moment, lowering his eyes, looking everywhere possible but into hers. His voice is strained, when he speaks again. Tearful, so broken, like she’s never heard him sound before, even the night he’d told her about Lila. “I could hurt you, Laurel.”

The words break her too, and she crumbles, something fracturing painfully inside her. Her shoulders sag, all the breath leaving her body, and she steps closer, suddenly resolute. Fearless. She swears she can see tears in his eyes, see him trembling with emotion. She wants to go to him, irrationally. Hold him. Comfort him. But she knows he wouldn’t let her.

 _I could hurt you._ Yes, he could hurt her. She knows this, maybe has always known it deep down. She’d always danced too close to the fire that was Frank Delfino; moth to a flame, good girl and bad boy and lion and lamb and every fucking bad cliché in the book. But still-

She shakes her head, more insistent this time. “You wouldn’t.”

“I _could_ ,” he repeats, grinding out the words through clenched teeth, as if on some mission to make himself look as monstrous as he can, drive her away, startle her and send her running, but they both know it won’t work.

She looks him square in the eyes, undaunted. “I’m not scared of you.”

“You should be.” He says it again, this time with less conviction. He glowers, but she can still hear the tears in his voice, the thickness, the strain. “Listen to me. I could… hurt you, I-”

“You won’t hurt me!” she chokes out, voice breaking. She goes to him, raising her hands and placing them on his cheeks, forcing him to look at her. He flinches, recoils, trying weakly to get away, but she doesn’t release him, and quickly he gives up. “Listen to _me_. I know you’d never hurt me, Frank, I-” The lump in her throat silences her. She tightens her grip on him. “I know you.”

A pause. His battered, bloody face is pressed between her palms. In his eyes she sees something like confusion, like he can’t process this; her touch, any form of gentleness when all he’s known for all these long months is violence and solitude. He looks so different. Hollow. A shell. A tormented animal. Animal – that’s what he looks like. A monster.

Her tamed monster.

But he’s looking at her then, looking her in the eyes. That’s something. Months ago she would’ve demanded an explanation tonight, for all of it – Lila, Annalise, his leaving. Now she’ll settle for just this; this moment of tainted calm amongst all the chaos. Seeing him. Seeing him is enough.

She loves him. She loves him so much she can’t breathe right then; even this part of him, all his darkness, all his quiet violence. All his monstrosity and everything he’s capable of. She sees it somehow and she loves him anyway, and that scares the shit out of her, and _God_ , _he_ scares the shit out of her. She should hate him. She should be disgusted – and she is. She’s disgusted by what he’s done and still, _still_ , she can’t do anything less than love him, in spite of everything, like it’s a habit, a reflex; something every atom of her is programmed to do, and has been from the very start.

What the fuck is wrong with her? With them _both_?

“I know you would never hurt me,” she repeats, softer this time, wetting her lips. “Okay? I know that.”

“I just…” He swallows again, lowering his eyes as if unable to hold them up any longer, bear their weight. “I didn’t want you to see me like this.”

“Stop saying that,” she snaps, letting her hands drop down from his cheeks. “Stop, just… just _stop_.”

For a while, they stand there in silence, only feet apart but it feels like miles, light years, so much distance that they can never cross it – not again. They can never go back, be like they once were, and she’d been a fool to come here thinking she could do just that, bring him back with her to the city and have things be exactly like they used to be. It’s a sobering realization, one that makes something sinister hook low in her gut and tug.

She knows it’s the truth. No going back. Not now. Maybe not ever.

“I thought I could fix things, coming here,” she murmurs, choking back tears, an air of defeat settling over her. “Make them… better, somehow. But I can’t, can I?”

No answer. He doesn’t offer one, doesn’t have to. They lapse into silence, and after it passes she gives a nod of grim understanding, pressing her lips together into a line.

“Right. I should… I should go, then.”

She doesn’t want to. It’s the last thing she wants, leaving him after only just finding him again – but maybe it’s right. And maybe it was a mistake to come here at all. It’s what she always does: tries to save people, cares too deeply. Can never let go. And he’s beyond salvation; she can see it in his eyes, the resignation in the way he carries himself. The fatalistic manner about him. He’s beyond any kind of saving, any hope.

Too far gone, even for her to try to save.

“Wait,” he says, suddenly, and she freezes, stops before she can take even one step towards the door. She stops, even though she shouldn’t, even though, by all logic and reason, she should keep walking, walk out of his life and never look back and forget she ever knew a man named Frank Delfino.

She stops, and turns. And before she knows it Frank is before her, so close she can feel his beating heart, eyes brimming with sincerity; broken and battered and half the man he used to be but suddenly – suddenly, there’s a flash of him. Of the Frank she’d known, once, long ago.

Suddenly he's himself all over again, if only for a second.

“Just… be here with me, for a second. I-” His voice catches. “I need that.”

She can see tears in his eyes, and suddenly she wants to break down and weep too, weep until she’s sick. Weep for the man she lost; the man he can never be again – but again, she refrains. She stays, and stands with him, and after a moment she steps forward, reaches up, and slowly, ever so slowly, loops her arms around the back of his neck, holding him in a tender half-embrace. Holding him because it’s all she can do, her presence the only comfort she can offer now.

She can’t save him. She never could.

She moves a hand up once more, tracing her finger lightly across the cuts on his face like intricate, gory designs, feeling the roughness of the forming scabs beneath them. She pauses, pressing the pads of her fingers beneath his blackened eye next, but he doesn’t wince, doesn’t flinch. He looks at her. Holds her gaze, for once – but again with those deadened, bloodshot eyes. He hasn’t been sleeping, she can tell. He looks thinner, more gaunt; he must not be eating, either, or taking care of himself. He’s withering, before her eyes. Dying. He looks like a dead man already and maybe she’s lost him for good now. The Frank she’d known, once.

The man she’d fallen in love with is dead. Gone. And this is his corpse, the hollowed-out remains of him.

Before she can help it tears spring to her eyes, her lower lip trembling, face crumpling of its own volition, and Frank notices. And tentatively, like he thinks he’ll hurt her if he does, he reaches out to caress her cheek with his hand, all split-open, bloody knuckles and callouses, but still somehow gentle. She’s never seen this look on his face, before – not really. It’s like he’s beholding her, committing every inch of her to memory, his eyes glassy with tears and blue and catching the moonlight at just the right angle. He’s so intent she’s not sure there’s anything else in the world for him right then, and he doesn’t say anything aloud but she understands him She’s always been able to do that: understand him without a word, in the silence.

There’s no fixing this. No fixing _him_ , and maybe no fixing them, ever. That’s what he’s telling her. She reads, loud and clear.

There’s no going back. Not for him.

“Hey, cut that out,” he chides, voice low, as a sob rattles through her. He gives something that, once upon a time, may have been a smirk on his features. “Don’t, Laurel.”

“Where’re you gonna go?” she says with a sniff. “What’re you gonna _do_?”

“I don’t know.”

He doesn’t have a plan, she realizes. No method to this madness of his. He’s out of control, going into a tailspin, looking like he knows that perfectly well but doesn’t know how to stop himself – and she doesn’t, either. She _can’t_ – because he needs this. He needs to be alone, by himself, off on his twisted quest for penance, this blood-soaked pilgrimage back to Annalise. She has no fucking clue where it’ll take him; she only knows she doesn’t belong on it with him, and all she can do is hope he makes it out alive, in the end. Makes it back, somehow.

Comes home, to her.

She’s the one to back away, though it kills her, though she thinks it’d be so easy to break down and stay, hold him through the night. She can’t. She shouldn’t have come here; she knows it now, and so with that in mind she turns to go, unable to choke out even a weak goodbye, knowing she won’t be able to keep herself from breaking down if she does. Maybe they’d been doomed from the start, the two of them. Fated to end up like this. Maybe they’d never had a chance but God, _God_ , some stupid, naïve part of her skill thinks they do, somehow.

He calls out to her before she can go, his words stopping her in her tracks.

“Did you mean it?”

She turns again, and frowns. “What?”

“The voicemail,” he says. “Did you mean that?”

 _I love you._ She’d been drunk, and sick with missing him. Bonnie and Annalise had coerced her into doing it – but it hadn’t been a lie; no, they’d been the truest words she’s spoken in God knows how long. She loves him. She loves him so much it feels like her chest is about to cave in right then and there, collapse on itself. She loves him so much it could kill her.

She loves him; the man and the monster. Loves him even like this, all his humanity and identity stripped away from him, as he stands before her now. She loves him and she doesn’t know how to stop, and the worst part is that she doesn’t want to, that even considering cutting him out of her life for good makes her feel ill.

“Yeah. I did,” is all she says, soft, hardly a whisper. “I do.”

She leaves him, with that. She has no more words and neither does he. There’s nothing either of them can say to repair this thing between them, shattered as it is, at least not until he absolves himself however he has defined _absolution_. She leaves him because she doesn’t know how to stay, to be enough for him like this; he wants forgiveness, but not from her.

She leaves him, alone with his darkness. She leaves him, and closes the door, and suddenly it’s like she’d never known the man named Frank Delfino at all.


End file.
